Reborn in Extinction

What is it about the detectives on those USA Network series that enables them to cultivate such fans? It was a treat to see Tony Shalhoub of Monk fame play a very different character in Teresa Rebeck's hilarious The Scene a few years ago, and now Psych's James Roday should delight fans by sporting facial hair and stepping outside his TV persona in tone and type in the promising if not quite fully realized Extinction, an Off-Broadway play by Gabe McKinley, the brother of onetime New York Times theater columnist Jesse.

Twice the Mackers

I've been in a sort of Macbeth maelstrom lately. For one of my final assignments for RT Book Reviews, I talk to Shakespeare scholar turned thriller writer Jennifer Lee Carrell about her new novel Haunt Me Still, in which a celebrated Shakespearean director goes on a quest to undercover a centuries-old manuscript of the cursed Scottish play. (Have to admit I prefer the U.K. title, The Shakespeare Curse, though not her billing as "J.L. Carrell." So they didn't think British readers would be turned off by a book with "Shakespeare" in the title unless it was written by a woman?)

And in the current Time Out New York, I interview Bill Cain, who co-created a short-lived TV series that I loved, Nothing Sacred, and is the author of Equivocation, now at Manhattan Theatre Club, a play about Shakespeare, the Gunpowder Plot, recent American politics and Macbeth. I look forward to seeing the play, which I've only had a chance to read, especially now that I've seen production shots, like the one above, that remind me of the John Doyle Sweeney Todd. And I owe a shout-out to the guy who first told me about Equivocation a year ago. His enthusiasm for the play was infectious.

Man of Many Colors

Nothing like a job layoff to throw you off your game, and that's what I was faced with this past month. How's that for a lead-in to my review of a solo show in which actor Michael Aronov showcases the many sides of his personality? He has stage presence and then some, and if you go, you may end up becoming part of the show.

Not Yet Royalty

Evan Enderle, Megan Tusing and Scott Sowers in Princes of Waco.

There's a lot of promise in Robert Askins' Princes of Waco — and in these troubled times promise and hope mean a lot — but I thought this new play at Ensemble Studio Theatre still has its share of growing pains.

Robert B. Parker Dies

Robert B. Parker

How sad to read about the death of Robert B. Parker, whose private-eye novels featuring the one-named wonder Spenser always seemed to find a home on bestseller lists.

I enjoyed talking to him a couple of years ago about his foray into the young adult market with a book called Edenville Owls, although I suspected he was eager to be done with our conversation so he could watch his beloved Red Sox play a spring training game. Incidentally, he has a peripheral connection to theater, one of my other favorite blogging subjects. One of his sons, Daniel T. Parker, is an L.A.-based actor who's performed with the Actors' Gang.

Moon Over Wambaugh

Joseph Wambaugh

When I mentioned interviewing ground-breaking crime writer Joseph Wambaugh to a few friend and colleagues, their replies ranged from "Is he still writing?" to "Is he still alive?"

The answer is a big yes to both those questions, as the evidence shows, and I recommend checking out his new novel, Hollywood Moon.

Critical Healing

Sayra Player, Peter O'Connor, Judith Hawking and
Sarah Nina Hayon in Sexual Healing.

Let me tell you, it's no fun sitting in the audience of a play like Sexual Healing and realizing you've been assigned to review a show that's choking before it even gets out of the starting gate. I don't have the same problem watching a bad movie. If it's a big Hollywood blockbuster like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, I can even scoff because so much money in the pursuit of awfulness. Even if that's not the case, in the time it's taken the film to get to the big or small screen, I can convince myself that cast and crew have moved on to other, if not necessarily better, projects.

But when the performers are right in front of you, not even gracing a Broadway stage but crammed into a tiny black-box theater, the mercury in my empathy meter soars off the charts. But I found a little consolation and a lot of laughs in this piece by Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune piece. Clearly, it is a critic's moral imperative to protect theatergoers from bad plays. We're doing God's work.